Posts Tagged ‘Economics’

Accumulation by Dispossession is the phrase David Harvey uses to discuss contemporary, so-called Primitive Accumulation: the commodification and privatization of goods, for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, and to the detriment and subjugation of all other classes. Primitive Accumulation, in turn, is the term Karl Marx used to describe the process of ‘enclosing the commons,’ forcing workers off of their relationship to the land and into the ranks of waged labor, the necessary factor of production that capitalists remain in need of, after they have accumulated and come into control of their machines of production. Here’s a link to a nice video by David Harvey discussing Primitive Accumulation, and here’s one discussing Accumulation by Dispossession.

I introduce these terms in order to contextualize the two videos below. Both are examples of Primitive Accumulation, perhaps obviously so. One takes place in the highlands, and the other takes place in a formerly middle-class neighborhood in the capital city. Both involve violence – both police and vigilante – and the law. Primitive Accumulation and Accumulation by Dispossession are taking place simultaneously in Cambodia; it occurs to me now, that this might need to be paid closer attention to.

Sometimes a number of stories come out all at once, and reminds you that no matter the supposed ‘distance’ from my topic, economics are often central to individual and social practice. All of these stories came in one day, in the Phnom Penh Post.

One of the themes I’ve been concentrating on in my new research is primitive accumulation in Cambodia. Primitive Accumulation, as used by Marx, is the process by which relatively ‘free’ peasants, who lived socially off the land via the management and sharing of the commons, were transformed into waged laborers, or those seeking wage labor, the so-called working class. All of this of course has a great deal of contemporary resonance in watching Cambodia (or any number of other places) today. I’m hardly the only person to have noticed this. Anthropologist Iain Baird of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been publishing on this topic. I was fortunate enough to meet him in person last year, and he directed me to a number of his relevant articles, which I recommend.

Of course, in Cambodia, one of the great stories of primitive accumulation appear as land grabs. Dey Krahom previously, and Boeung Kak now, become relatively famous because of their location in Phnom Penh, but land grabs have been a constant threat in more rural areas for quite a long time. The Buddha sangha in Cambodia has been confronted with a scandal in the last few months, as activist monk Venerable Luon Savath has been progressively stripped of his ability to rely upon sangha requisites – especially shelter. Banned from staying in capital temples previously, he has now been evicted from Watt Ounalom. Some of his supporters – reportedly from Boeung Kak – helped him move his belongings.

More generally, Cambodia is waiting to hear the US government’s decision on import tariffs from Cambodia. Cambodia’s export markets are not terribly diverse, and therefore highly dependent on state-to-state relations with its few customers. The United States and the European Union occupy the biggest seats at the table. As a result, decisions on tariffs in the US make enormous changes in Cambodia. While the Cambodia garment industry has been adding jobs in the last quarter, the reduction or elimination of select tariffs would almost certainly result in the rapid addition of more jobs. This is absolutely necessary if Cambodia is ever to experience significant secondary industrialization and the development of a more varied urban workforce. Dependency on agricultural exports and garment work is a recipe for constant crisis. But, challenges in the judicial sector (widespread perceptions of corruption, e.g.) and in retention of profits (expatriation of profits, e.g.) remain the largest challenge in this regard.

Finally, after a series of mass faintings at factories, in which employers and upstream brands have promised investigations, etc., the Arbitration Council has declared a strike over irregular pay and 8 other significant problems illegal, and ordered the workers back to their stations. The union in question the Cambodian Coalition of Apparel Workers Democratic Union (C.CAWDU) has accepted the decision, but this is significant in so far as it appears to be setting the stage for the new norm that the government and the Garment Manufacturers Association of Cambodia (GMAC) are hoping becomes reality after the passage of the new Labor Law.

I’m very excited to see Professor Kheang Un interviewed in this video available on youtube. Along with Professor Caroline Hughes, he is co-editor of the upcoming publication “Cambodia’s Economic Transformation,” a collection of essays on, well, Cambodia’s economic transformation. I’m pleased to have an article included in this collection, about how Pretas (“Hungry Ghosts”) are employed by contemporary Cambodians to discuss moral reciprocity and its failure.

Howdy, readers. I’ve been in the great Cascade Mountains of Washington State, and far from the internet. But I’m back now, working on my manuscript (yes, really), and trying to keep households and students from imploding (sort of). While I was gone, a lot of important things happened. Here are some of them!

In the first six months of 2011, beef has increased some 12.07 percent to 26,000 riel a kilogramme, smoked fish has seen a 22.63 percent increase to 16,800 riel, and pork has climbed 25.37 percent to 21,800 riel on Phnom Penh markets, the Commerce Ministry’s daily report on Friday showed.

Hun Sen didn’t quite manage to make it to ប្រាសាទ​តាមាន់​ធំ​ Prasat Ta Moan Temple, which I’ve written about previously (start here, I suppose), last time Thailand and Cambodia’s nationalist factions started squabbling over it. The whole thing is simultaneously silly and infuriating. ព្រះ​វិហារ, which is the real object of contention, is clearly Khmer. Everyone of consequence has agreed, including previous Thai governments. But now, because Thailand is dealing with a nascent fascist movement (again), relatively meaningless issues like the placement of a border post and the control over a non-lucrative, largely ruined, temple like Prasat Ta Moan, becomes serious.

And it’s all cloaked in the language and rhetoric of sovereignty and nation. If these governments are so concerned with the well-being of their co-nationals, they might question why Surin province in Thailand, and Oddar Meanchey province in Cambodia, receive so little serious government support or funding for issues relating to actual well-being.

Meanwhile, Cambodia has asked the US government to cancel it’s outstanding debts of $339 Million dollars from the 1970s (when the client regime of Lon Nol was fighting a proxy war against its own people and the guerilla communists, on behalf of the US), or else turn it into aid. I doubt the US would agree to stop collecting debts on its historical protection rackets (can you imagine them canceling the debt that Iraq is going to be saddled with for its ‘liberation?’), they might turn it into ‘aid:’ that all just gets spent on American machinery and ‘foreign expert’ salaries, anyway. See Will Easterly’s awesome, and relatively new, blog, Aid Watch.

I don’t have the fight in me for this round of “Let’s blame an American intellectual for the Khmer Rouge,” but Sophal Ear, whom I know and am friendly with, has entered another round in this effort (scroll down about halfway). I have no sympathy for it, and find it sad to see yet another generation of scholars and thinkers on Cambodia enrolled into stale and meaningless Cold War thinking. What exactly is Chomsky accused of? Apologist for the Khmer Rouge? Never did it. Critic of American intellectuals who merely cheered while we illegally and secretly bombed Cambodia, leveling it with more tonnage of explosives than was used in all of World War II? Yes, he did that, and I can’t imagine apologizing for that. By virtue of this previous critique, is he supposed to have been a proponent of the authoritarian and secretive Khmer Rouge? Hardly: Chomsky has been a avowed anarchist since his youth, which necessarily entails a critique and opposition to not merely the unrestrained forces of feral capitalism, but also the vicious and violent authority of the state (anarchists were the first critics of the authoritarian communists of the Soviet Union, for instance, and have been persecuted more often by their state-communist sisters and brothers than even by the capitalists). It all seems very much like those who want to make Chomsky responsible for the horrors of the Khmer Rouge are either egregiously overestimating Chomsky’s influence (do they imagine he was somehow influencing public policy, and that therefore more bombing of Cambodia would have helped keep the KR at bay?) or holding him morally responsible for being an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, which I doubt he’d be inclined to apologize for.

The presence of unregistered workrooms could also damage the work Cambodia has done towards making a name for itself in good labor conditions. This has been sought as a competitive advantage, as Cambodian manufacturing can cost more and labor skills are lower than in competing countries.

Buyers like Levi Straus, Gap, Nike Air and Walt Disney demand respect for labor standards and worker rights. Such buyers can lose confidence in Cambodia if the country does not respect its promises of high standards, Art Thorn, president of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers, told VOA Khmer.

The presence of workrooms can decrease the impact of demonstrations or strikes, he said, because they allow owners to subcontract their work. He would welcome such businesses if they operated legally, he said.

The great explorer Zheng He, whose Chinese ships came through Southeast Asia, is explored on the BBC World Service. Check it out! (via)

In addition to Andrew Walker’s inventory of some of the surprising accomplishments of the Thai state in achieving its Millenium Development Goals, this post by wonderful journalist Awzar Thi (a pseudonym), over at his blog, Rule of Lords is today’s must-read.

Responding to Paul Collier‘s half-baked, militarist suggestion that what countries in crisis (specifically, Zimbabwe) should hope for are military coups, Awzar Thi runs down the actual history of coups, and shows how awful they are for those over which they rule, no matter the high hopes of the populace (and international imperialists), nor the horrendous state of affairs prior to the coup. He concludes

Let us not praise coups, and let us certainly not wish them upon people who are already acutely suffering their iniquities. They are not a way out of trouble but a way into more of it. No better advertisement of this exists than Burma today.

It came as a small surprise when I read in the paper that fast food restaurants existed on Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Somehow the idea of interrogators stepping out of a prison waterboarding session for a latte seemed… incongruous. (The idea of them rewarding prisoners with ‘Happy Meals’ even more so.)

With Cambodia’s entry to the World Trade Organization, and the Stock Exchange opening up in 2009, it seems the sky’s the limit. Now, if only we could just get rid of those pesky homeless people and beggars who get in the way of all this new prosperity!

(Above: Licadho)
Well, Cambodia got its own island prison camp too: Koh Kor. After some starving inmates escaped, and the news media got wind, it was quickly shut down and the inmates were dumped back on the streets. Most of them.

Still running on the outskirts of Phnom Penh is Prey Speu detention center. With an election officially in progress, it’s surprising that no party has taken this up as an issue. Maybe they’re happy to have clean streets for their election caravans.

Fast food and arbitrary detention. Cambodia is joining the world of global ‘convenience’. For those who can afford it.

This news came out yesterday when I was traveling. And today, being May Day, does not have enough hours in it for me to do justice to this news. The food crisis, and specifically the rice crisis, is revving up.

Then, the strange news that despite the insufficiency of rice in the country currently (and Cambodia’s growing population), Cambodia announces its plan to lead the world in rice exports, hoping to export 8 Million Tonnes of Rice Per Year, by 2015. I fail to see how this will happen. “Three Tons Per Hectare,” anyone?

From a purely economic standpoint setting up an effective rice cartel appears feasible. Unlike corn, wheat and other grains, rice is very thinly traded because only a handful of countries export in large quantities. The largest rice producers, China, India and Indonesia, consume the vast majority of their rice crop domestically.

I don’t know enough about the functioning and normal effects of commodity cartels (more reading to do now, I suppose), so have no idea offhand whether this is a good or bad thing. Please sound off in the comments if you have thoughts on this.

Introduction
This short essay emerged out of my attendance at the recent Working Class Studies Association conference held at Macalester College. The conference had many excellent contributions, fantastic participants, and was educational and exciting for me. However, as one participant put it, many of the attendees seemed to suffer from a serious case of ‘ABC-itis': A.nything B.ut C.lass -itis. That is, they largely eschewed clear discussions of class, often explicitly denying that it was either possible or useful to define the term which identifies their organization. To my particular horror, one of the presentations even proposed a method by which it is possible to ‘build inter-class alliances.’ Why did this horrify me? Because I firmly believe that (a) class exists, (b) it is crucial to an understanding of the world in which we live, and (c) that it is impossible to build inter-class alliances. As a member of the IWW, I agree wholeheartedly with the first clause from our constitution’s famous preamble: